Another weekend and some more data recovery

This weekend:

• I became a year older — boo. I got some lovely presents — yay!
• My son smiled at me for the first time — yay!
• I was able to find an O2 shop that had a 16GB iPhone in stock — yay!
• I set up my Dad’s new PC, and it seems to work — yay!
• I was able to recover his data from his old broken disk — yay!
• I took an extra day off (today!) to spend more time with my family — yay!

So, all in all, pretty damn funky weekend.

The data recovery was achieved in the end by booting a ‘backup’ Windows 2000 ISO on QEMU, and then buying R-Studio Data Recovery and running that on the data. A bit of a disappointment, but I ran out of time either rolling my own or getting either ScroungeNTFS or testdisk to work.

As I write this I’m now waiting for a 150GB file copy from the virtual disk to a cleanly formatted 1TB drive to give to my Dad. Because I’m an idiot, I originally recovered the data onto the virtual disk, and not the final destination.

To add extra fun, rather than copy the data out somehow from the virtual booted Windows 2000, I’m copying using:

• A network block device server to read the data block-by-block from the virtual disk.
• The network block device client mounting that image as /dev/nbd0.
• kpartx to get the partition out from the raw block device as /dev/mapper/nbd0p1.
• Finally, mounting /dev/mapper/nbd0p1 as an NTFS disk (natively in Linux), and copying using nautilus. (Though Malc points out rsync might have been a better choice.)